I agree, considering AMEX and Citi as bad options, is laughable, at best. They are probably among the most desired employers.
I am not too concerned for the elite college English/other humanities majors - they seem to do alright (some of them face underemployment, but that is often very temporary). Our humanities majors at more average institutions are in a fair bit more trouble, however (unless their families’ SES/connections are already high). They may face extended underemployment.
The post I replied to mentioned that English majors at elite colleges will not be limited in the same way as English majors attending non-elite colleges, partially because they can get work at “places like McKinsey or Goldman Sachs.” The implication was that attending an elite/prestigious college means special access to elite/prestigious finance/consulting companies, such as Goldman Sachs, which wouldn’t be available in the same way to grads from non-elite colleges. American Express generally isn’t thought of being as elite/prestigious/exclusive as Goldman Sachs. And many working in finance are absolutely concerned with relative elite/prestige/… of different finance companies.
I do not agree with this type of assessment. I don’t think grads from “elite” colleges need a special exclusion from employment limitations. Instead I believe that English majors at both elite and non-elite colleges are more likely to be underemployed or unsatisfied with employment early during their career, which can contribute to feelings of regretting major. It’s certainly not 100% of grads. Most English majors are probably satisfied with their major choice. Even among the extremely biased sample ZipRecruiter survey from the first post, only a minority of English majors said they regretted their major. But that minority of English majors who said they regretted their major was a larger magnitude than occurred for all other surveyed major groups.
Perhaps rather than dwelling on choice of major, it would be better to focus on the quality of offerings of each college’s career center? Because I get the sense that many parents and their kids have very little understanding of the actual job-hunting process. College major is only one of many factors, and probably one of the least important, as compared to personal work experience (including but not limited to internships) & individual job-seeking / networking strategies.
Citi Global Markets is an Investment Bank ranked in top 5. Should be a good enough employer for any new graduate. They may hire ambitious English and History majors.
Montclair State is a respected NJ teachers college supplying teachers for North Jersey public schools. An English major with a teaching certificate will eventually do ok financially.
Don’t attribute this to me. They’re your words. My post mentions that the first group includes those who love the major (first choice - innate talent, desire, you name it) AND those who get culled from other majors (take it as an insult as you want, but it happens a LOT at oodles of colleges - so often it gets joked about commonly eg Engineering is a Pre Poly Sci major, etc). The second group doesn’t see folks switching into it from the first (not as a general happening anyway - I’m sure there are anecdotes).
I suspect those from the first group who don’t regret their major (the majority of grads) wanted it vs ended up in it. That part is conjecture… 
I suspect those in the second group who regret their major were those pushed into it (parents - perceived ROI - who knows?) who “could” do those majors (academically), but really never wanted it themselves. More conjecture, but to me it makes sense.
I know from what I see that those who head into the right niche for themselves tend to end up content - it doesn’t matter what the path is - just that it fits the student. Often they find that niche either in college (sometimes changing majors due to wanting something different vs culling of those who can’t do X or Y) or a year or two out of high school trying out various things/jobs.
Results from a survey of hundreds of employers is at https://chronicle-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/5/items/biz/pdf/Employers%20Survey.pdf Surveyed employers ranked college major as by far the most important surveyed academic factor in evaluating new grads for hiring decisions – more important than relevance of coursework, GPA, or college reputation. However, internships and relevant work experience were ranked as notably more important than any academic factor, including college major. A similar pattern to the overall trend described above occurred in all surveyed industries. The author summarizes by stating,
The specific majors that surveyed employers liked varied by industry, as one would expect. Tech companies said they liked CS and Electrical Engineering. Health care companies said they liked Nursing and Health Professions (other). Only media/communications ranked English majors among the majors interest. Media/Comm employers ranked English majors 7th, just after CS.
Nope. Insulting would be saying everyone in those majors is lower class or inept or whatever word one would choose to insert. That’s definitely not true. I suspect those who don’t regret those majors are doing well and quite content having found their niche in life. Our world needs all niches filled. I enjoy teaching. H prefers engineering. He can’t do my job and I can’t do his. On top of that he doesn’t want my job and I don’t want his. Nothing insulting at all about our preferences.
If anyone looks into the data on who changes into what major, I think the percentages would show what I said in the post. Does that data exist anywhere? If it matches, I suspect it would explain the differences in regret rates fairly well.
You are right that Goldman is more prestigious that Citi or AMEX in most cases, but we are beginning to split hairs here in the grand scheme of things (I know my friends in IB would hate me saying something like that, but this is splitting hairs for most people). Citi, AMEX, and others like them are clearly gainful employment and would not count as “underemployed” situations (assuming the job is not something like a teller or a call center operator).
You are right about the students interested in teaching and are able to qualify. However, most are not.
You are right that more people are likely to be weeded out of the STEM majors than the humanities/social science majors. However, I would not say that would make the humanities/social science majors are less able intellectually or anything like that. It is just the culture in academia (influenced by many factors, such as pressure from the AMA causing cuts to the number of residencies, making medical schools far more selective, and subsequently forcing Universities with undergrads to play the dirty game of culling premed students to maintain/augment their reputations and rankings) to give STEM majors a harder time.
The point is not that Goldman Sachs is more prestigious than AMEX. It is that employment in the described positions is very rare. Out of all English majors in the multi-year sample, one Cornell English major worked at AMEX. The actual reported outcomes of English majors does not suggest that many Cornell English majors are going into investment banking and/or consulting. It isn’t even clear that the rate of English majors going in to banking/consulting is higher than would occur at less elite colleges. It’s clearly possible for some English majors to go in to banking/consulting as the total is >0, but a similar statement could be made about English majors attending less elite colleges as well.
Instead the overwhelming majority of Cornell English majors go in to other fields, most of which are associated with relatively low earnings. For example, the CollegeScorecard lists a median earnings of only $32k for Cornell English majors. In contrast, the majors that did well on the regret survey from the original post listed much higher earnings. For example, the same database lists median earnings of $116k for Cornell CS majors, which was the least regretted major in the survey.
Fair enough - I am not trying to say that Cornell English majors are doing better than their CS counterparts. However, they definitely have better options than their English major counterparts at non-elite institutions. That is what I keep going back to.
On a somewhat unrelated note, the College Scorecard potentially has a limited use for the smaller Ivies and the like (which Cornell isn’t admittedly). A large portion of students at Ivies and the like (sometimes 20% or more, do not qualify/need ANY federal student grants or loans), so they would not even be included in the college scorecard. It might make the sample sizes for each major too small to even compare. Not sure if the scorecard removes those stats by default - I need to learn more.
The better options is not obvious (to me). If you controlled for a measure of student quality (such as SAT score), a measure of student’s career field(s) of interest, and a measure of parents’ wealth; I’d be surprised if Cornell English major grads have better average options or better average outcomes than English major grads from less elite colleges. In short, I believe that the primary drivers for different outcomes among English majors are dependent on the student, rather than the eliteness of college attended.
CollegeScorecard’s two-year earnings sample included 87 Cornell English majors… IPEDS lists 123 graduating English majors, so the CollegeScorecard sample appears to include earnings from ~70% of graduating English majors. This sounds a bit high, considering that only ~30% of Cornell students have federal loans and ~16% have federal grants. Perhaps the federal loan/grant students are more concentrated among English majors than average, or there is another category of federal FA that I am not considering. For CS, the sample was 371/569 = 65% of CS grads.
This is pure conjecture on my part, but maybe the higher amount of English students than CS students having federal fin aid @ Cornell can be partially attributed to the percentage of international students in CS being higher.
As for opportunities depending on the student - of course! But, let’s be honest. Many of the elite opportunities are basically automatically closed off to non-elite college attendees. If you want a career in investment banking/other elite finance or management consulting, it is extremely difficult to do so without going to a target or semi-target. I realize very few English majors go for those positions, but it is not an insignificant amount. The salary data seems to support this (elite schools having their humanities/social majors earn more than non-elite schools). The big exceptions are non-elite private schools. But students attending non-elite privates are usually more financially and socially well-off than their non-elite public school counterparts, especially considering the vast majority of non-elite privates usually do not have much money to grant generous financial aid.
To compare Cornell to a less elite upstate, NY private college, I looked up Syracuse. Their employment summary at http://careerservices.syr.edu/outcomes.html mentions a non-zero number of grads working at Deloite, Morgan Stanley, etc. However, I agree the portion of Syracuse economics/polisci/… grads working in “elite” finance/consulting is probably quite a bit lower than Cornell, and “elite” finance & consulting employers generally do care about prestige of college name.
This is not especially relevant for English majors because so few grads are working at these companies. It’s unclear how much of that is because many English majors aren’t interested in finance/consulting, how much is because many are not eligible, and how much of that lack of eligibility relates to major and/or course selection; but the end result is few English majors work in finance and consulting at both Cornell and Syracuse. I imagine comparable high quality students from both Cornell and Syracuse have numerous other higher salary options beyond just finance and consulting, particularly ones involving professional/graduate school, such as pursuing a JD.
The fields that English majors from these colleges do work in seem to have similar median earnings at both colleges. College Scorecard lists a median income of $30k for Syracuse English majors, compared to $32k for Cornell. I expect the large difference in average student quality between Cornell and Syracuse would more than explain that small $2k difference in earnings. Among larger numbers of colleges, CollegeScorecard reports the same $34k median average earnings for Top 1-20 ranked private colleges and top 21-50 ranked private colleges, suggesting a similar pattern. There does not appear to be a clear salary premium for attending an “elite” college among English majors.
@Creekland, your assertions are still insulting to humanities majors.
Basically, you’re making the (evidence-free!) assumption that STEM majors are inherently more difficult than humanities majors, and moving onward from there.
I get that this is a pretty widespread piece of conventional wisdom, but I would suggest that it’s ill-founded. I’ve seen a decent chunk of folks who washed out of majors like philosophy and communications, f’rex…
The high salary for STEM majors incentivize many students to start there, when they really have no business being there. Either they were pushed into it, have no talent, made the decision themselves without knowing what is involved, etc.
A bad match, in essence. “Men are better at spatial ability than women, but by golly we’re going to force more women into STEM.” This makes STEM look hard, but it is very sensitive to matching. I couldn’t have survived an English curriculum, but it was never even considered. I got lucky that engineering was a good fit.
Syracuse is a pretty well-ranked University in its own right - but I agree probably not elite. However, its student population is disproportionately well-off financially (over 50% of its students come from the top 20% of household incomes and 26% of its students from the top 5%). Like I said, attend an elite school or come from a well-off family, and you are doing pretty okay with a humanities/social science degree the majority of the time. I would wager the well-off family factor is a bigger factor than the elite school boost.
Modern peer-reviewed research does not seem to have consensus on whether men have greater spatial ability than women due to biological differences. However, there does seem to be consensus that social factors play a much bigger role than any biological factors (if they exist). resulting in men being advantaged for developing this ability. So, the assertion that we are “forc[ing] more women into STEM” is kind of misleading. Instead, it seems we are forcing women out of STEM, starting at an early age and becoming especially prevalent during adolescent years.
https://www.futurity.org/spatial-reasoning-gap-2035092/
Disclaimer: The vast majority of these studies are operating on the premise that males are men and females are women (this is true the vast majority of the time). This research largely does not address gender non-conforming or transgender people.
On the issue of so-called elite schools making a humanities major “worth it”: I looked into the job placements for graduates of the English program at our local decidedly non-elite open-admissions college over the past 10 years, and found that nearly all of them are either in graduate/professional school or employed (and most of those who aren’t it’s by choice, such as a couple graduates who opted to become stay-at-home parents), and that a clear majority of those are employed in a field related to English studies broadly defined (e.g., editors, grant writers, journalists) or in the field they went to professional school for.
So—and by the way, this is what I’d expect, given national employment figures—while you may need an “elite” degree to become a McKinsey consultant after majoring in English, it appears that you certainly don’t need an “elite” English degree to end up using what you studied it in your job.
https://pages.github.berkeley.edu/OPA/our-berkeley/major-migration.html (best viewed on desktop or laptop computer, rather than phone or tablet) indicates that, for at least one state university, attrition (from frosh intention to graduation) out of the STEM categories of majors is less than for humanities and social science majors.
Note: L&S (liberal arts including most sciences) frosh enter undeclared, while engineering frosh enter declared in their majors.
But also, not all STEM majors lead to high paying jobs. Biology is typically a big major, but does not typically lead to high pay jobs at the BA/BS level.
I am knowingly wading into a landmine again…
For all cultures, there are subjects that are considered off the table. In ours, standardized testing is one, another one is stereotyping. If we stick with psychology’s definition of stereotyping, there is a lot we already know about it. I have a feeling we don’t really want to know about it however.
Lee Jussim is probably the world’s leading authority on the subject. (Yes, he is another one of my favorites). Here is an excellent summary of his research and his conclusions:
https://aeon.co/essays/truth-lies-and-stereotypes-when-scientists-ignore-evidence
Mokita- “truth we all know but agree not to talk about.”
The graduation rate of colleges shows that people “wash out” of “college.” Period. I assume that’s all majors. Kids get there and opt to major/minor in party, money runs out, health issues occur, it’s simply not what they expected, and/or a combo of other things end up happening and college gets dropped.
Otherwise, it’s not news to most that certain majors require a “type” of student in order to graduate. They aren’t something “everyone” (academically capable) can do “just because.” Often students know by high school that they aren’t going to be engineers (for example), but sometimes they think they can. Regardless, someone who isn’t cut out for these majors (usually) can’t graduate with them - they don’t have the grades.
In other majors most students could graduate with them, but that doesn’t mean they will have a GPA > 3.0 or that they would enjoy it. I despised English and was glad my AP credit from high school allowed me to just take one class of it for one quarter in college. If I had to have that for my major I’d have regretted it. But if I’d had to I could do it. I’m not sure the same is true for Engineering - possibly because my main major was Physics with Math as a minor, but I look at what H does and I’m not sure. I know oodles of people who look at Physics (or Math) and say there’s no way they could major in that even if they had to.
You’re welcome to disagree, of course.
But you’re connecting this whole thing to human value as are those who feel if you’re not employed by X or Y that somehow one is less content or lower on some sort of value ladder. That boggles my mind. To me all people in all (legal, ethical) niches have the same value and can be equally as content with their lives. It doesn’t matter if they package your potato chips or manage your investment fund. Satisfaction with life and value of life isn’t dependent upon titles or positions. Many times those at the “top” have more stress, not less IME. Finding the contentment niche with a self sustaining job is the goal - not reaching the top of some sort of invented “value” ladder.